The People Dislike Vista
As the deadline for purchasing copies of Windows XP looms on the horizon, the vote count at the “Save XP” web site continues to rise. At last count it was around 194,000, which is really only a few fish in the sea in comparison with the number of overall Windows users. Naturally, it’s doubtful Microsoft will deign to extend its lifetime past the current 6/30 execution date.
This said, the sheer hatred some users seem to have developed for Vista is astonishing in its depth. One commentator even went so far as to suggest that Redmond should deep-six Vista instead, retaining the more reliable and popular XP for the foreseeable future. Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen. But it shows how badly Vista is faring in the eyes of some user segments, and Microsoft should at least take note.
Even PC vendors have taken notice. Dell, HP, and Lenovo are all apparently “offering consumers a way to purchase a PC or a notebook computer with the last version of XP via a so-called downgrade. This basically means you are paying for Vista and getting the discs, along with the option of upgrading to Vista anytime in the future. ” This is having their cake and eating it too — with all the complaints about Vista, refusing to include XP with a new machine would probably cause some customers to balk and go elsewhere. By also shipping Vista CDs with the machine, the vendors also keep Steve Ballmer from blowing a NAND gate.
During all this hullabaloo, XP continues to cook along happily. SP3 was just released, and the list of fixed “issues” makes for perfect bedtime reading. Some are minor annoyances, others are security fixes, others are subtle but serious problems that only certain segments of the user community would ever encounter. Applying it is probably a good idea. And no, it won’t make your machine suddenly act like it’s running Vista. That would be wrong.